Entertainment

Mass Relevance Gets Sporty With TaylorMade, MLB

Major League Baseball and golf brand TaylorMade both introduced powerful Twitter curation tools this week designed to assemble relevant tweets for baseball fans and golf fans following the US Open.

MLB's 140 Club tracks and compiles fan and player tweets relevant to the sport's hottest topics, and provides a feed from the official @MLB account. TaylorMade's US Open social destination similarly aggregates fans tweets for the tournament that begins Thursday and includes some more explicitly marketing oriented features.

Both tools are the result of collaborations with Mass Relevance, Twitter's official social curation and integration partner. Mass Relevance CMO Matt Corey tells Mashable that, while sports haven't always been a focus for the company, they are "definitely" something that will continue to grow.

"Fans are very passionate about their favorite teams and players, and fans want to engage and interact," he told Mashable in an email. "Sports teams and events have a huge opportunity to capture these conversations, and early adopters like MLB and TaylorMade are forging new ground here. Over the next year, we'll see rapid change and innovation in social experiences between teams, brands and fans."

The TaylorMade site's centerpiece is a rapidly updating feed sortable by the #USOpen hashtag, TaylorMade staff and media are covering the tournament. It also includes plenty of sections promoting the brand. Fans can tweet support to TaylorMade sponsored golfers, as well as vote which sponsored contestants are most spiffily dressed. The company's Instagram account and photos are also promoted.

MLB's 140 Club, meanwhile, has already received a lot of positive feedback from baseball fans on Twitter since launching Tuesday. A combination of algorithms and human curation selects trending topics from the sport, then provides a live stream of relevant tweets. Fans can use a navigation bar on the left to decide which stories to catch up on, essentially choosing their own crowd-sourced news feed.

MLB's site in particular — while not an official partnership with Twitter itself — does continue a recently emerging trend of sports entities shaping Twitter's hundreds of millions of daily tweets into something more resembling an actual news source. The company recently launched an official partnership with NASCAR, and has hired people — some with journalism backgrounds — for editorial roles in curating and managing content.

What do you think the next step will be for the relationship between Twitter, media and sports? Let us know in the comments.

Mashable
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